


last serving daughter

by piggy09



Series: Obscure Word Fics [19]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Bad Parenting, Gen, I was going to put more tags on this but does it really NEED more tags than that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-14
Updated: 2016-03-14
Packaged: 2018-05-26 18:12:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6250225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It hurts: being able to see. Rachel hadn’t thought it would hurt. If you’d told her, she wouldn’t have believed it.</p><p>Then again – there are plenty of things she wouldn’t have believed. In one fell swoop she’s been given an eye (of sorts), a daughter (of sorts), and a mother – well. She’s so lucky, isn’t she.</p><p>(Or: what I want for Rachel, Susan, and Charlotte in Season 4.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	last serving daughter

**Author's Note:**

> ...and what I am probably not going to get. But. You know. Whatever.
> 
> From a prompt on Tumblr:  
> "Rachel | Cryptadia: things to be kept hidden."
> 
> [warnings: suicidal ideation, suicide references, rachel generally being horrified with her body and her eye and herself]

You’d think it would grow easier: watching your parent rise from the dead, right in front of you. But what was Rachel supposed to do? Expect it? She’d thought Leekie competent enough to make at least one grave; she was mistaken, of course (in hindsight: of _course_ ), but she’d given him that one last gift: an assumption of competence.

In hindsight: of course.

It doesn’t get easier, not really. At least this is the last time – it has to be, because Rachel has no one left to not lose. After her mother and father died, she stopped caring.

…but of course, neither of them were dead. She is served tea in a cup that’s thin and white as a butterfly’s wing; Rachel watches her hand tremble on the handle of it, takes a sip. In her mouth the taste is bitter and burned, something like ash. She keeps drinking anyways – she’s swallowed more bitter things, for appearances’ sake.

Professor Duncan apologizes. Says: _you couldn’t know_. Rachel’s father apologized too, his hands large and rough around her own. Rachel takes another sip of tea, tries to force the words past the walls her teeth and lips have become: _I understand. Of course_. Her lips, still, are able to form that same patient and unfeeling smile. She lets them.

Somewhere in her breastbone something is twisting, sick, and Rachel can’t tell if it’s love or disappointment. On the bad days – after Sarah – she would pass the time imagining that the pencil had sunk into her breast, cut through her heart instead. Imagining Pandora’s Box, opened. She’d rather lose her heart than her head.

But here she is, with her heart still pounding merrily along. Her hand trembles in a mute rhythm on the teacup. Her father is dead, and the only living Professor Duncan is looking at her with concern over the rim of her own teacup. Rachel takes another sip.

* * *

After the professor leaves, Rachel rolls across the room to the door and attempts to open it. She isn’t surprised to find it locked, but she pulls at the handle anyways -- over and over and over again, a desperate gesture. The same sort of frantic animal instinct that had made her carve circles around the room before. _Hello? Hello?_

When the handle doesn’t open she rests her forehead against the door and breathes, shakily. This close to the wood the eye can see all the individual grains, and it hurts: being able to see. She hadn’t thought it would hurt. If you’d told her, she wouldn’t have believed it.

Then again – there are plenty of things she wouldn’t have believed. In one fell swoop she’s been given an eye (of sorts), a daughter (of sorts), and a mother – well. She’s so lucky, isn’t she.

She looks down at her own hand. Her vision is so bright, and sharp, and she can see the way her fingers are shaking around the handle of the door. So she lets go.

* * *

Rachel wakes from a dream that she can’t quite remember; some distant memory, dusty and cold. Lately she’s been dreaming about ice, and snow, and faraway places where all you can see is blank white no matter what direction you look in. Waking always feels like drowning.

She claws her way to the surface in time to hear the sound of Charlotte’s voice, reproachful: “You fell asleep.”

“Sorry,” she says. She blinks, focuses her eye and eye. Charlotte’s curled up in this oversized bed – which, for now, is almost the entirety of Rachel’s world – with a book propped between them. The pages are green, and there’s an illustration of the Tin Man standing in the corner of the page. He’s smiling. She would smile too, if she could stand.

“Do you not like the story,” Charlotte says. “We can switch, if you want.”

“I never—” Rachel tries – with the now-familiar sour horror of the missed syllable, the forgotten word – “r-read. It. When I was your age.”

(She thinks about Veera, briefly.)

(Then she stops.)

“ _I_ like it,” Charlotte says, and with a child’s impatience she flips through the book – scattered images, a woman on a throne, an array of warped and twisted apes, a rendering of a heart that isn’t anything close to accurate – and pauses near the end. Her fingers trace idly over the illustration: the Tin Man, axe wielded menacingly, advancing on a frightened old man.

“He’s just an old man in the end,” Charlotte says. “Everyone’s afraid, but he’s just a silly old man.” Her voice trembles, slightly. “And all you have to do to melt the witch is throw water on her. And the Scarecrow gets his brains and the Tin Man gets his heart and the Lion gets his courage and Dorothy gets to go _home_ —”

She slams the book shut, shoves it across Rachel’s bed, curls up into a miserable ball next to Rachel. Only the brace on her leg keeps her from curling up all the way. Her shoulders are shaking; she’s crying. Rachel blinks, hears – or imagines – the distant insect-sound of her eye recalibrating.

“This is your—” she pauses, forces the word out: “home. Now. I know it must be d-d-dif – difficult.”

“You don’t know _anything_ ,” Charlotte says. “If you were my mum you’d know what to do.” She lets out a horrible animal sound, thin and shrill, and says: “But my mum is _dead_ , and _you’re_ supposed to be her now, but—”

“She’s – dead,” Rachel interrupts, sharp and urgent.

“I think so,” Charlotte says, words wavering. “They won’t let me see her. The professor just said you would take care of me, she _said_ —”

“My mother – died,” Rachel says, once again slicing the tendons of Charlotte’s hysterical fear. “Also. They took – took me from. My home. I was alone.”

She remembers leaning over Kira, saying: _perhaps you may even grow to like it here, just as I did_.

But the equally-present memory: wheeling in circles around this room, unable to leave. _Why are you keeping me here_.

With her tongue made of lead weights and faulty machinery, it’s difficult to believe her own lies. What could she say? _I turned out perfectly alright_ , maybe, but obviously…well. Obviously she did not turn out perfectly alright – she’s _here_ , with some piece of foreign technology jammed into her eye socket and an avalanche of words buried in her throat.

Charlotte peeps out of the huddle she’s made of herself, one bright eye considering Rachel. “Isn’t Professor Duncan your mum,” she says, sharp and curious and a little bit cruel.

Rachel lets her gaze skip to the security camera. Blink. Blink. Blink. If she had the words, she could weave a tapestry that said neither _yes_ or _no_. If she only had a tongue. If she only had a—

* * *

Professor Duncan visits sporadically and without warning. This time Rachel wakes up to find the professor sitting in a chair next to her bedside, paging idly through a book Charlotte had left behind. Rachel pulls herself to a sitting position, folds her hands on her lap in an attempt at some sort of dignity – whatever dignity one can obtain while wearing silk pajamas.

“Your father used to read to you,” the professor says idly, flipping through the pages of _The Velveteen Rabbit_. “Do you recall.”

 _Stop asking me what I remember_ , Rachel wants to say.

“Yes,” she says. “Not – _rabbits_.”

“Bit of a silly story,” says the other woman with an agreeable nod of the head. “If you see the object as real, a fairy will come along and make it so. Ethan was prone to his flights of fancy, but even he understood that this was a foolish thing to teach a child.”

“Why are you k- _keeping_ me here,” Rachel spits.

“No,” Professor Duncan continues, as if Rachel hadn’t said anything, “he read you _The Island of Doctor Moreau._ I think it was penance, Rachel, don’t you? Quite the ego, our Ethan. Thought he’d made all his monsters on his own.”

She blinks, rapidly, closes the book and looks at Rachel. “No one is _keeping_ you here,” she says. “This is a place for you to recuperate and heal. I’ve only ever wanted the best for you, Rachel.”

“You d-d-d-” Rachel pauses, lets out a frustrated breath through her nose. “Died. In a – fire.”

The professor raises her eyebrows, as if to say: _really, you’re still bothered by that._ “We were putting the experiment at risk,” she says. “Or so Aldous thought. I saw an opportunity to make the best of an…unfortunate situation. I understand that you’re upset, but…” she trails off, looks around the overly-ornate furnishings. “You wouldn’t have been safe. It was better this way, Rachel. My dear Rachel.”

 _Not yours,_ Rachel thinks. _Not anymore._

“You c-could have – told me. Any – time,” she says instead. “Why – now.” She knows why. But she wants to hear it, wants the words to ring in the dust-filled silence of this room.

Instead the professor just looks at her, eyes guileless as a child’s and blue like a crayon sky. “I told you,” she says gently. “It wasn’t safe. We have so many enemies within the DYAD, you know. You could have been hurt.”

“I _was_ ,” Rachel snarls. “D-did you ever th – ink. That if you had _been_ there. I. Would.” And she gestures futilely at herself, her carcass, hand lagging several seconds behind thought. She exhales, sharp, doesn’t finish the sentence. The professor stares at her for a few seconds, as if she’s waiting to hear the ending that doesn’t exist. As if she doesn’t get it. And of course she doesn’t: this is the ideal, Rachel’s certain. Her daughter helpless, bound to a bed and so beautifully _necessary_. A piece of machinery ticking away inside her head. Picture books thrown all over the blanket.

“I’m so very glad you’re here, Rachel,” Professor Duncan says. “I’ve missed you.”

Rachel’s words hang around them in the air, like smoke, and Rachel doesn’t understand how the professor can pretend they aren’t there. But then again, it makes sense: she’s always been so good at escaping fires.

* * *

The video tapes and VCR are there one morning when Rachel wakes up, a reminder as pointed as – well. She wonders when she’ll wake to find a printed-out copy of the book on the table. Imagines the morning after, her fingers transformed into pencils, her other eye a magnifying glass. Subtlety does not appear to be Professor Duncan’s domain. Then again, she’d known that from waking. Finches behind glass, feathers clipped. Rachel in a wheelchair. She would roll her eyes, if she had them.

She pulls herself into the wheelchair, holds her breath to see if any more strength has come back into her muscles. Maybe a little more than yesterday. Perhaps a little more than the day before. What a kingdom to build her hopes on, so far away from the printed-out certainty of a lab report. She moves across the room, slow, slow. Eyes the collection of tapes.

Where did they get them, she wonders. Was someone sent to her apartment, another maggot in the corpse of the DYAD? Did they pass by the patch of floor where her father breathed his last, pull the tape unceremoniously from the player?

Or are these copies?

She trails shaking, unornamented fingers over the box. Halloween, holidays, graduation. Pavlovian response: she looks at the tapes and her tongue remembers old wines, ’64, ’59, sitting in her bed with her fingers stroking idly up and down the stem of her glass. _Look at the camera, Rachel darling._ Outside the door the sound of her monitor moving around the apartment. Inside the door, giggling – but the sound so thin that it barely registered. Like dust settling.

She’d picked up a tape but, in a clumsy spasm, she drops it. She’s realized what she’s feeling in her stomach: rage. Jealousy. Hatred.

She hates her past self. Hates the easy wine-doused smirks, hates the walking. Hates that most of all. Of course the ability to call a man into the room and put him on his knees, but god – more than anything, the ability to stand over him. She misses it. She hates that she can’t have it. She’s always been so very good at jealousy.

On the floor the tape is shattered. Her fifth birthday. She watches the cracked plastic, numb, waiting to see if its loss triggers some corresponding echo in her – but it doesn’t. Her fifth birthday is a shaky camera held by her father towards their breakfastnook. A bay window with green curtains, a vanilla cake with purple icing. The letter _R_ in the word _Rachel_ bulged with icing; it was piped sloppily, by shaking hands. She knows every pixel on that image, word she said that day. The loss of the actual tape doesn’t matter.

She watches it on the ground anyways. Someone will be by soon to clean it up, the way every day someone comes to clean _Rachel_ up. Their hands – all – over her.

She thinks, with a sudden jolt, like missing a step on the staircase: _I wish I was dead._ The thought is so bright and so sharp, like wrapping your fist around a knife blade. She holds it and listens to the sound of her breathing. In out in out, damp little sounds. The machinery of her body winding along anyways, even though she never asked it to keep going.

 _I wish I was dead_. Rachel opens her mouth, and starts to laugh.

* * *

It takes Professor Duncan an additional week to place the copy of the book on the table in Rachel’s room. It’s the first thing Rachel sees when she wakes up – right where the mirror was, on her first day here. She doesn’t know – never knows, anymore – whether she feels like screaming or crying. Maybe both.

She doesn’t touch it. Doesn’t look at it. Hates that the book reminds her of Sarah, now, the way that house had smelled. Warm and familiar, like sun-warmed wood. Sarah had leaned over Rachel when she’d drawn a line from one dot to another and Rachel had wanted to _ask_ her something – didn’t know the question, but had wanted to ask it anyways. _Do you think about what you did to me. Are you happy. What is it like to have your mother standing behind you, ready to pull out a rifle for your sake. Do I want you to be where I am, right now, do I wish we’d switched places_.

 _Did you know_ , she’d thought, holding the words in that increasingly-familiar place behind her tongue, _that I met my father again right here, in this room. Sarah, did you know he told me he was sorry that my mother had died._

_I cried, here, at this table. Did you know?_

She looks at the book now and thinks of Sarah in that prison camp, the fervid desperation on Felix’s face when he had – when he’d. Someone had climbed mountains for Sarah. She’d been there, standing over Rachel like she could never be knocked off her feet. No handcuffs on her wrists. No prison-wide eyes. Someone had saved her, when she’d needed it. Someone had pulled her out of the cell she’d lived in and into the sun.

* * *

They let Charlotte into her room and she trots in cheerily enough, meets Rachel’s eyes for a shared second of silent misery before she goes back to her default expression. Rachel’s proud of her, in a way. She’s learning how to pretend easily enough.

But Charlotte stops at the table, grabs the printed-out copy of the book in both hands and flips through it. “Someone drew all over this,” she says, frown clearly audible in her voice. “Why’d they do that?”

“They wanted to say – something,” Rachel says; she folds her hands in her lap to crush the stupid desire to grab for the book, wheel across the room and pull it out of Charlotte’s hands and hiss _it’s mine_. “But they couldn’t say it in a letter. Or. The wrong p-people would have – read it.”

“Oh,” Charlotte says, already sounding bored. She pauses on one page, and Rachel would bet all the money she doesn’t own that it’s the one with her shaking pencil (and what a _hilarious_ joke that was) lines skittering across the page.

“Who was it for?” Charlotte asks.

“Me,” Rachel says. The word sounds quiet and small and unreal in this great bright room. Like a desperate plea for existence.

“ _Really?_ ” Charlotte says. She goggles at Rachel, open-mouthed. They can both hear it clearly, Rachel’s sure: _who would write a code for_ you _?_ It wasn’t for her, is the thing. It was for a dead girl. But the dead girl whispered the knowledge in Rachel’s ear before she faded away into nothing, and so now Rachel is the only one in the world who knows. A lonely existence: everyone in the world who knows about this code wishes she wasn’t the one to hold it. Even Charlotte, now.

“Yes,” Rachel says. Charlotte grabs the book and the ornate fountain pen that’s been left on the table next to it, scrambles into Rachel’s bed and veritably shoves the pen and paper at her.

“Decode it!” she says. “I wanna see.”

“I can’t,” Rachel lies blithely. Adds another lie, because she can: “I’m sorry.”

“No you’re not,” Charlotte says.

“No,” Rachel says. “I’m not.”

Charlotte looks at her, eyes unsettlingly old in her face. Rachel wonders if that’s how her face looked, when she was young. Maybe that’s why Aldous stopped being able to meet her eyes.

Charlotte’s chin sets, raises. She stares at Rachel with eyes like tiny chips of steel before taking the copy of the book in her hands, standing up, and deliberately crossing the room. Out of Rachel’s reach.

Then she starts ripping the pages of the book in half. One by one by one, the only gift Rachel’s father ever gave her falling into tattered pieces. Rachel raises her chin, doesn’t look away from Charlotte even as the little girl’s eyes fill with tears. _Notice me_ , that’s what that gaze says. She wouldn’t stop if Rachel told her to. But that is probably what she wants – someone to say _sweetheart, don’t_. Because that would mean that someone cares.

One of Rachel’s eyes stings, a little bit. She wonders if it’s tears. She doesn’t raise a hand to her face and she doesn’t tell Charlotte to stop; she just sits there and watches Charlotte ruin everything, book pages falling around her like terrible snow.

* * *

“You could have stopped her,” Professor Duncan says. Her voice sounds disappointed. She brings her teacup to her lips, eyes Rachel over it with a look of sad reproach. She’s brought Rachel out of her room for this. Rachel actually bit her lip on the way to this room, just to keep from laughing at the sad reality of this trick. She used to do the exact thing, when she wanted a position of power. Bring someone into your space. Loom over them. Own every inch of the room.

She wonders if she’d learned the trick from the professor. But she thinks Professor Duncan left her too soon to pass it on.

“Really,” Rachel says dryly. Her hand trembles slightly on the handle of her own teacup. She stares wryly at the other woman, doesn’t bring the teacup to her lips. _Did you know how he died_ , she thinks. But doesn’t say it. What would be worse: if she did know? Or if she didn’t?

“She’d listen to you,” says the professor with a sigh. “You’ve taken on a mother’s role now, Rachel dear, you could at the very least make an effort.”

Despite herself Rachel has missed this dance, the delicate choice – to say _I don’t have much practice_ would wound Professor Duncan but would imply failure on her own end. To say _so could you_ would be petty, but would bring one small spark of happiness to this – purgatory. Checks and balances.

“She misses – M—” Rachel starts. To her horror the _mm_ sound extends, hangs from her lips like drool. She can’t find the next vowel. Abruptly she cuts the end of the sentence, starts over. “Her other mother. She needs – time. To adjust.”

 _You idiot_ , she adds internally.

“Well, she’ll certainly have that now,” Professor Duncan sighs. “I have people working to reconstruct the book, of course, but these things take time. Who knows when it will be ready for your…interpretation of it.”

“Mm,” Rachel hums vaguely, taking a sip of tea. She lowers her eyelids slightly, meets the frustrated gaze directed her way with a mask of calm. _Go on_ , she thinks. _Go on, then._ But the professor says nothing, only takes another drink out of her own teacup. Doesn’t look away from Rachel – or, that is, doesn’t look away from just one of Rachel’s eyes.

* * *

She starts physical therapy with a revolving array of carefully blank-faced doctors. It makes her so angry that she gets nauseous, acid boiling her stomach and burning her bones. The hobbling, the skittish step-after-step.

 

Sometimes she falls.

 

At the end of the day she’s wheeled back to her room and she tells herself she refuses to cry and then she cries. Each day becomes its own looming horror: the failure to walk, the return to the prison chamber, the crying. One eye leaking tears, the other one so bright and so still. This cycle is her life now – this is all she has. Just this. They won’t let Charlotte into her room, anymore – Rachel’s unsure who they’re trying to punish – and so it is just Rachel: alone.

She sits by the window and closes her eyes and remembers. The taste of tea, the sound of an orchestra warming up, the look on Sarah Manning’s face when Rachel had seen her – before her oophorectomy. That bone-deep expression of despair. That loss.

Rewind. The process of getting dressed in the morning. The sharp stab of delight at seeing her face perfectly-constructed in the mirror. Rachel presses her tongue to her lip, tastes salt, buries herself deeper inside her own head. Primer. Foundation. Concealer. Bronzer. Blush. Eyeshadow. Eyeliner—

Her eyes snap open; the illusion shatters. There’s a dull ache of wrongness in one eye socket, now, a persistent headache she constantly chooses to ignore. Right now it’s so strong she can taste it on her tongue: ozone, the bitten lip. She sighs through her nose, closes her eyes and watches the nauseating combination – one part darkness, one part an overclose view of her own eyelid. The eye never turns off, never stops looking. It exhausts her.

The counter in her bathroom was marble. A sort of peach color. Two sinks. A bottle of soap, if she can remember the smell of it. The way she lined up the makeup on the counter. In front of her: the mirror. Always the mirror. Always the opportunity to see herself, see what she’d made of that one blank canvas.

She can hear the wet snuffling sound of her own crying; she raises the volume on the soundtrack in her mind, drowns out her own breathing with the trill of violins. In the prism of her memory they sound frantic, like caged birds. The shriek of strings, the sound of animals beating themselves against the bars until they collapse.

* * *

She wakes to a hand in her hair. There could be a second where she lies there with her eyes closed and treasures the feeling of being touched with something resembling affection – but there isn’t. Her eyes snap open and she says “ _stop_ ” before she even realizes she’s fully awake. The word falls off her lips soft and boneless. When did _stop_ become a plea, and not an order? When did it start sounding so helpless?

Rachel sits up, with difficulty. Next to the bed the professor is sitting perched in an ornate chair, like a bird ready for flight. That is: not like any of the birds around the both of them, eternally frozen behind glass.

“Don’t – t- _touch_ me,” Rachel snaps.

“I’ve heard you’re improving,” Professor Duncan says. “I’m glad.”

Rachel can feel her hand, under the blanket, curling into a fist like a claw. “No,” she says, voice frigid. “I want this to be – clear. You _do not touch me_.”

The other woman’s head tilts to one side; a frown forms between her eyebrows. “Come, now, Rachel dear,” she says. “You used to like it when I combed your hair out, don’t you remember?”

“I was a child,” Rachel says, the words forced out between my teeth. “You were my m-mother.” Unsaid, but hanging in the air: neither of these things are true anymore.

The professor’s chin rises, and Rachel can see it in her eyes: the bone-deep chill that let her weave death into the bones of a million and one little girls, cold enough to let her survive a fire. “I gave you life,” she says, leaning back in her chair. “I made a place for you. I gave you your _sight_ , Rachel – there’s no need for this ungratefulness. It’s beneath you.”

“What if I never wanted any of it,” Rachel says, and then stops. She hadn’t meant to say that, that’s the first thing. The syllables are soft and the words are soft and – worst of all – it’s honest. But secondly: every single word of that sentence was perfect. No stuttering. No consonants pushed out with force. It’s the first perfect sentence she’s said – since. She wishes it hadn’t been true.

In the chair next to the bed Professor Duncan sighs, low and long and sad. Rachel doesn’t turn to look at her. She doesn’t want to see, with unbearable artificial clarity, the slump of her shoulders. She’s an old woman. Sometimes it hurts to remember that.

“You’re tired,” the professor says. “Physical therapy is difficult for you. We’ll talk later.”

Rachel turns and looks towards the gaps in the top of the wall. Outside the light is so bright that she can’t see anything, not even one little bit of the world. One of her eyes waters, and her vision tries desperately to blur.

“I won’t change my mind,” she says quietly. There’s no answer – only the noise of the chair shoving back, the heartbreaking and beautiful sound of someone standing up and walking away.

* * *

No one tells Rachel that she and Charlotte are expected to reunite until the latest anonymous assistant rolls her into Charlotte’s room and leaves her wheelchair there. (The manual chair is a small humiliation; Rachel hates the sting of dread she’s grown conditioned to feel whenever she sees it. What is worse, than someone deciding where it is that you will go?) And then there she is, in one of the many bedchambers in this grotesque altar to excess. She can feel the professor’s hand in this, all of this – look at her, she’s you, she needs you to protect her – and it mostly exhausts her.

Charlotte’s made her room more of a living space than Rachel’s – then again, she has both the inclination and the mobility. Drawings paper the walls. Blue skies. Parks. Charlotte hasn’t drawn herself, or Marion, or Rachel, or the professor. The only humanoid figures Rachel can see reside in the bright green Emerald City Charlotte’s hung up by her bed. Dorothy’s flat paper face radiates misery. There’s no place like home.

“Oh,” comes a voice, sharp like growing older. “Why are _you_ here?”

“Did you finish the book,” Rachel says, without answering. She can hear the dragging sound of Charlotte’s footsteps, as she circles into Rachel’s line of sight, and—

 _Oh_ , Rachel thinks, with a sort of awful tenderness. Charlotte’s cut her hair. It’s choppy, sticking out like a lion’s mane around her face. Their hair curls if you don’t straighten it. If it isn’t heavy enough to be held down.

“The Wizard?” Charlotte asks, straining for bravado – but her voice still shakes, and her eyes still meet Rachel’s like butterflies desperate for the pin. “Yeah. It was a dumb story anyways. You can’t click your shoes and go home, that’s silly.”

“You can’t,” Rachel says. “There are no easy solutions. I c-could have told you that.”

It takes Charlotte a moment to realize they aren’t talking about the shoes, and her chin goes up defensively. _Don’t clench your fists_ , Rachel thinks, watching the fragile curl of Charlotte’s bones. She doesn’t say a word.

“Maybe you just did it wrong,” Charlotte says. “Maybe I’ll do it better than you.”

“Or maybe you’ll just repeat my mistakes,” Rachel says. The words come out quieter than she means them to, the _r_ sound dragging out of her lips like it’ll burn her. Maybe you’ll just: regret, rewind, ruin everything. She tilts her head to one side, feeling almost overwhelmingly fond, and says: “You’ve cut it lopsided.”

Charlotte flushes angrily, looks down at her feet. “I’m not Dorothy,” she says, voice bitter with fury. “I’m not a stupid girl who needs a Tin Man, and a Scarecrow, and a Lion. When I beat the witch it won’t be with a bucket of water.”

“I look forward to – seeing you do it,” Rachel says. She smiles, a sad and lopsided thing. Charlotte looks up at her, and smiles back.

* * *

Rachel wakes from a dream that she can’t quite remember; something about the sun, she thinks, something about home. In the dream someone had smiled at her, and she’d been so absolutely certain it was real.

She sits up. She puts one foot on the ground.

* * *

This time they bring her to a different room, ornamented with nothing but a table and a mirror that takes up nearly an entire wall. Cruel, cruel – in a way that Rachel, grudgingly, respects. Of course she is supposed to see what has been made of her. She should know, should look at the mirror and see the bruises beneath her

eyes

and see the trembling sticks that used to be her fingers. She should meet her own gaze in the glass and realize that there is something trodden-down in it, the bared belly, the surrender.

Instead she looks down at the table. At her hands. If she asked for nail polish she could get it, she’s certain, but – god. The idea of nail polish smeared around her cuticles. Unthinkable.

Between her hands, the careful placement of her palms on the table: the latest copy of the book. Or rather the carcass of it, ripped apart and put back together poorly. Rachel breathes through her nose in sharp, painful drags of air and tells herself it’s just a copy. Out there in the world somewhere is the original book, undamaged. Her father’s fingerprints still dust its spine; it isn’t here, all torn up, all – all—

Well, she shouldn’t shy away from the word. It’s broken.

And next to the book is a pencil – a pointed reminder to stop playing games. In the absolute smallest of mercies, it isn’t yellow. It lies there innocuously, and it is next to her hand, and she could move her fingers one infinitesimal space and pick it up. Put it to the paper. Finally, finally learn what it was that her father wanted to tell her.

Here is what stops her: the realization, small and tattered as the hope at the bottom of Pandora’s jar, that she does not want to. She doesn’t want Professor Duncan to know, to have this, to claim a part of her father’s ghost. In the story Ariadne solves the labyrinth and is left behind. Rachel does not want to sit here in this room and decode her father’s book.

On the achingly white piece of paper she’s been given, she draws – with hands that only tremble, now, and minutely – a flower. She used to do this when she was young, when Susan and Ethan Duncan were nothing but old ghosts. She would sit in meetings and populate the margins of her notes with blobby, unformed flowers. They never looked like anything real. To this day she’s unsure if she meant them to.

Then she puts the pencil down and, with delicate fingers, begins turning the pages of the book. _Hello there_ , she thinks to herself. _It’s been a long time._

**Author's Note:**

> I forgave you your shortcomings  
> And ignored your childish behavior  
> Laid a kiss on your head  
> And before I left said, "stay away from fleeting failure"
> 
> There's hope in the air,  
> There's hope in the water  
> But sadly not me:  
> Your last serving daughter  
> \--"Hope in the Air," Laura Marling
> 
> The entire song used for this title is _extremely_ Rachel Duncan -- that first stanza! -- and thus I listened to it a lot for this fic. Other songs on the soundtrack: Viva La Vida by Coldplay, the Of Monsters And Men cover of Kids by MGMT. _The memories fade/Like looking through a fogged mirror/Decisions to decisions are made and not fought/but I thought/this wouldn't hurt a lot, guess not/Control yourself/Take only what you need from this/A family of trees, wanting/to be haunted_
> 
> Thank you for reading! Please please kudos + comment if you liked, comments mean the world to me.


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